I have a very high end computer. Nothing so bleeding edge that any app has ever had a problem figuring out how to work with the hardware but high enough end to run most anything Steam or the XBox store have dreamed up. I am not even a gamer, I am a videographer, but I love flying. And for me, MSFS2020 worked beautifully from release date till 1 minute before patch 1.8.3.0. Now, the patch simply refuses to download. I have tried everything suggested in the forums: direct connection, wireless, VPN, Net Limiter, throttling my internet at the router, turning off every other app, turning off the firewalls and virus protection, whitelisting the app, etc., etc., etc. It will not download. Or, rather, it downloaded about 5.5 GB, then froze up on the bigfiles, which it repeatedly downloads and resets.
This is not an issue of my internet, nor my hardware, nor conflicts. This is an utter failure on MS and Asobo’s part to address their shoddy server problems. And I am already reading hype on the internet about the next patch to make the sim prettier.
Insofar as I can tell, the dev team pays little attention to the forums. No one from MS or Asobo replies or relates what is being done to fix issues or gives inside information on fixes–they just leave us to guess through this mess.
It is clear to me that Asobo and MS are focused on hyping the sim at this time, because when you Google it, all you come up with are glowing media articles about how beautiful it is. If you want to get the dirt on the insanity of making it work, you have to go to private bloggers and small Youtube channels. And all the while, thousands of users can’t even get it to work, and there are still people that haven’t even been able to get it to properly download ever.
I think if users start going to the media and sharing their nightmare experience of this sim, we’ll likely see a situation emerge similar to the No Man’s Sky fiasco, with the developer apologetically eating crow and scrambling to fix the primary issue at this time: fixing their craptacular server problems. I bet we’d start to get some better communication from them, too.